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After nearly two decades in the baking business, City Bakery is expanding again.

The popular maker of sweet and savory baked goods already has cafes on Biltmore Avenue and Charlotte Street in downtown Asheville and another on Main Street in Waynesville.

In the coming weeks, City Bakery will open a production kitchen in a Fletcher warehouse, enabling the bakery's breads to appear in more stores and restaurants.

Owner Brian Dennehy said all baking currently takes place in the flagship Biltmore Avenue location. “We’ve been pushing the limits of what is physically possible in that space for a while," he said.

As such, expansion of the restaurant's bread line, which supplies a number of local restaurants and grocery stores, has been nearly impossible. But as some of those key customers go — Luella's and Nine Mile have recently added new restaurants, for example — so does City Bakery.

The new production kitchen will allow the bakery to keep pace with its customers' growing demand as well as double the number of Ingles grocery stores from the nine it currently supplies. Dennehy also expects to supply more wholesale restaurant clients.

The new production space will also allow the bakers to create new breads and ramp up production of special-edition loaves, including those made with locally milled Carolina Ground flour and a "loaded potato" bread made with wild ramps and cheddar.

"And we'll continue to do what we normally do with pastries and desserts," Dennehy added.

That includes filling a growing need for custom cakes, an established source of income rarely marketed by the bakery. There just isn't enough room for proper production, Dennehy said.

Additionally, the new Fletcher space allows the bakery's distribution footprint to extend into Henderson County, while its 10-strong bakery department is likely to double by the year's end.

For now, Dennehy expects his new Italian mixers and ovens to start arriving in the next couple of weeks. Test production should start in the next two months, with bread leaving the warehouse in 10-12 weeks.

The new facility, on Old Airport Road near Cane Creek, will not be open for retail sales, although Dennehy said that might change. He also wouldn't rule out the possibility of opening new cafes.

"We want to stay regional," he said. "We don’t have any plans for a frozen product, because staying regional and fresh is our plan."